By CCHR International
The Mental Health Industry Watchdog
May 20, 2019

Members of the mental health watchdog, Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) and others concerned about the continuing use of electroshock treatment on 100,000 Americans each year—some aged five or younger[1] marched through the streets of San Francisco on Saturday, May 18, to the Moscone convention center where the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) was held. They loudly chanted for the end of electroshock—the passage of up to 460 volts of electricity through the brain causing a grand mal seizure that can result in permanent memory loss and brain damage. CCHR reports that several psychiatrists crossed sides to join the protest, giving a “thumbs up” for a ban and agreeing with placards saying electroshock is “torture, not therapy.”

CCHR spokesperson for the march, Rev. Frederick Shaw, a former Los Angeles County Sheriff Deputy and current Executive Director of the Inglewood South Bay branch of The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said the protest was needed given the fact that pregnant women, children and the elderly are being electroshocked. He specified that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has never demanded shock device manufacturers provide clinical studies to prove the device is safe and effective, and have left them on the market despite one of the manufacturers conceding last year that ECT could cause permanent brain damage.[2]

Following the protest and addressing the opening of CCHR’s world acclaimed Traveling Exhibit was Ms. Jan Eastgate, President CCHR International

Following the protest and addressing the opening of CCHR’s world acclaimed Traveling Exhibit on the history of psychiatry’s harmful treatments and abuses, Shaw spoke of a national NAACP Resolution obtained in 2017 that is critical of ECT’s use, especially in children, adolescents and young adults. Jan Eastgate, President of the CCHR International spoke of how CCHR helped obtain the precedent California law in 1976 that bans electroshock treatment on children and adolescents. “This ban needs to be expanded to all age groups and worldwide,” Eastgate added, “because electroshock causes harm, electroshock creates brain damage and electroshock ruins lives. CCHR has been documenting this for 50 years. We are the voice of patients and families who want to see an end to physically damaging practices in the field of mental health.”

Other speakers included James Sweeney, Political Liaison for the Black American Political Association of California (BAPAC) and Founder and Managing General Partner of Sweeney and Associates, an advocacy and consulting firm.He also supported a ban on ECT and talked about the history of psychiatry’s racism. Emceeing the Exhibit opening was Fran Andrews, the executive director of CCHR International, joined by Lee Spiller, the head of CCHR Texas, which has the strongest law to date providing protections against ECT, including a report system that records deaths during and up to 14 days of receiving electroshock.

CCHR draws attention to little known facts about ECT:

Pregnant women, even in their third trimester, are electroshocked despite adverse events that include miscarriage, premature labor, stillbirth, fetal heart problems and malformations.[3]

Women are 2-3 times more likely than men to receive ECT. Approximately 70% of shock survivors are women and 45-50% are over 60 years old, with 10-15% being 80 years and older.[4]

Hundreds of U.S. veterans are given electroshock treatment every year, according Veteran Administration statistics.[5]

A July 2018 United Nations Human Rights Council report on “Mental health and human rights,” called on governments to recognize that forced psychiatric treatment, including ECT, are “practices constituting torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment….”[7] A February 16, 2013, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment report defined procedures such as electroshock without the consent of the patient as a form of torture.[8]

Australian psychiatrist, Niall McLaren wrote that any psychiatrist who says, “‘You need ECT’ is really only saying, ‘I don’t know what else to do.’ I will repeat: No psychiatrist needs to use ECT.”[9]

CCHR is a mental health watchdog group established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and the late professor of psychiatry, Dr. Thomas Szasz from the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. CCHR has been instrumental in obtaining informed consent rights for patients and a prohibition of ECT on children and adolescents in California, Colorado, Tennessee, Texas and in Western Australia—the latter enforcing criminal penalties, including jail, if electroshock is administered to anyone younger than 14.[10]

[7] “Mental health and human rights: Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development,” Annual report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and reports of the Office of the High Commissioner and the Secretary-General, Human Rights Council, 10-28 Sept. 2018, p. 14, point 46, https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G18/232/93/PDF/G1823293.pdf?OpenElement; (In Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish).

Allegations continue to be rife, exposing sexual assault, fraud and patient abuse in private psychiatric hospitals—with the for-profit behavioral sector accused of putting profits before patient safety. Factoring in media reports covering one month alone—March 18 to April 18—ten psychiatric facilities in nine U.S. states and one in the UK, owned by three different U.S. hospital chains, have come under scrutiny.

Media Reports covered:

Fourteen lawsuits were filed against eight facilities—with more than half of the suits related to sexual assault of patients, including the rape of a 13-year-old while under the care of a facility.

Allegations largely involved children, including a 9-year-old foster child held illegally and injected to “calm her”; a 12-year-old boy abused, beaten and bullied; 14- and 17-year-old girls died under hospital “care.”

Staff punching autistic children and an employee punching a patient in the face.

One facility treating children was forced to close because it was “unsafe.”

Some $660,650 was paid out in fines.

It begs the question how any local council or government agency, including the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, continues to fund or allow such psychiatric facilities to operate. And given the ongoing exposure of abuses in the mental health system why criminal and civil accountability is failing to protect patients.

An attorney firm speaking on behalf of a private psychiatric hospital company indicted in December 2018 over illegally detaining patients, claimed that criminal prosecution “ignores legislatively enacted blanket immunity which allows medical professionals discretion in treatment and ultimately in the good-faith decision to discharge.”[1] (Emphasis added) Governments and law enforcement must remove any “blanket immunity” and ensure that treating psychiatrists, staff and corporations are held equally accountable to any lay person who assaults, criminally neglects or otherwise abuses individuals.

Despite serious allegations against private behavioral hospitals, some companies are expanding their business—for example, Laurel Ridge in San Antonio, Texas, owned by Universal Health Services (UHS) is expanding the facility to treat members of our military.[2]

On 12 April 2019 Becker’s Hospital Review warned that UHS “can’t dodge claims it held patients illegally, investors say.” Shareholders have been in a legal fight with UHS since 2017 (amended in November 2018) and argue the King of Prussia, Pa.-based hospital operator can’t dismiss claims it fueled revenues by exaggerating patients’ risk of suicide and involuntarily committing them to its psychiatric hospitals. The company and its behavioral health facilities are also the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Department of Justice. In the fourth quarter of 2018, UHS said it added $31.9 million to its reserve for the investigation. The reserve now totals about $123 million.[3]

On April 18, 2019, The Dallas Morning News reported that a lawsuit was filed in Dallas County district court, accusing staff of the now closed UHS-owned Timberlawn behavioral hospital of negligence and “inhuman character” that allowed a 13-year-old girl to be raped in 2017. The father of the girl filed the suit alleging that under Timberlawn’s care, a 17-year-old male patient sneaked into his daughter’s room one evening and raped her.[4]

Following the incident, federal hospital inspectors launched an investigation and found the hospital had placed the boy and girl in rooms near each other and had falsified paperwork to make it look as if the two were in a public area at the time of the assault. They also found the floor was understaffed that night. As The Dallas News reported, “State regulators moved to revoke Timberlawn’s license, saying it was too dangerous for patients. But before that could happen, UHS shut down the 100-year-old hospital in early 2018….”

On 4 April, WAVY TV ran the story of a 16-year-old male patient at UHS-owned Newport News Behavioral Health Center in Virginia, strangling a staff member and absconding from the facility. The boy held the staff member by the neck from behind, told a 17-year-old boy to take the person’s keys and walkie talkie, then the two left but the 17-year-old was stopped by other staff members. The staff member was taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. The article covered another incident where 17-year-old Raven Keffer died while in the facility’s care in June 2018. She had just been medically discharged from a rehab program in Arlington and transferred to the UHS facility. She felt extremely ill and complained to staff about pain in her chest, and was repeatedly throwing up, even throwing up blood.[5] A former Newport News Behavioral Health Center staffer said that Raven’s pleas for medical care were ignored by facility staff. The Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services investigated Raven’s death and found that the facility violated more than a dozen standards of care, including depriving the teenager of appropriate services and treatment, failing to document her significant medical concerns, and failing to note her health complaints.[6]

Not a week later, on 10 April 2019, UHS-owned Palmetto Pee Dee Behavioral Health in Florence, South Carolina was facing new criticism following a 12-year-old boy escaping from the facility and claiming he had been abused, beat up, and bullied while in the facility. Former residents, having heard the boy’s story, came forward with their own allegations concerning the facility. One told media that a staffer would “physically abuse the little (autistic) kids punch(ing) them in the stomach.” In March, the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control (SCDHEC) cited the facility for multiple violations including the mishandling of patients, inadequate monitoring of patients, insufficient staffing and failed supervision.[7]

In January 2019, Nicola Seahorn, a former employee of Georgetown Behavioral Health Institute in Texas, owned by Signature Healthcare Services, filed a lawsuit after reporting to state regulators she saw an employee punch a patient in the face. The alleged incident occurred in June 2018. Two weeks later Seahorn was fired. The Texas whistleblower statute cited in Seahorn’s lawsuit bans employers at mental health facilities from disciplining, firing or otherwise punishing employees who report violations of state laws or rules. [8]

Seahorn’s lawsuit comes at a time when the 5-year-old hospital is facing scrutiny by state regulators:

The Health and Human Services Commission fined the hospital $180,000 in January after officials said it failed to monitor patients appropriately, which allowed two patients to have sex.

The penalty came shortly after the facility agreed to pay $62,500 for failing in 2016 to protect patients from being sexually and physically assaulted, not properly monitoring a suicidal person, and leaving a scalding hot water dispenser within reach of patients. [9]

As The Statesman pointed out, “Since 2015, the Department of Family and Protective Services has paid the facility more than $1 million to care for foster kids.” Yet, in November 2017, a former employee sued the hospital, saying he was fired after he reported to management that staffers were mistreating patients. Public records indicate it may have been privately settled.[10]

At least two other people have filed lawsuits against some of Signature’s other hospitals, claiming they were fired after reporting poor conditions at the facilities. A lawsuit against Aurora Behavioral Healthcare-Santa Rosa in California is ongoing. [11]

One of the lawsuits “characterizes Aurora and Signature as routinely prioritizing profits over the care and rights of patients and hospital staff.”[12]

A lawsuit at Dallas Behavioral Healthcare Hospital in DeSoto was settled — but that wasn’t the end of its problems, according to The Statesman. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had recently threatened to pull federal money from the DeSoto facility because of medication administration issues and sex between underage patients. [13]

1 April: KOAT TV disclosed the closure of Acadia psychiatric facility Desert Hills in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A resident told media that he lived next to Desert Hills for three years and was tired of seeing children being mistreated. “Two-hundred- to 300-pound men jumping on a little boy that weighs maybe 90 pounds. Come on, man, you’re gonna break his back,” said the neighbor, Leroy Baca. Baca said he had witnessed children being sedated. “I’ve seen them running down the street after them with those [sedation] canisters. It’s like a bullet, but they shoot them,” said Baca. A spokesman admits workers at Desert Hills did use chemical restraints on the children regardless of The New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department’s request for them to stop. CYFD forced the facility to close because they thought it was unsafe.[14]

4 April: The Chicago Tribune reported that six lawsuits had been filed claiming abuse and safety issues at Acadia Healthcare facility Timberline Knolls in Lemont, Illinois. The lawsuits are in connection to counselor Michael Jacksa who has been charged with sexual assault and abuse. The six separate lawsuits allege that the high-end facility for women and girls showed reckless disregard for patient safety by hiring and failing to supervise therapist Michael Jacksa as well as “intentional infliction of emotional distress” on patients who sought treatment for psychological and behavioral disorders. [15]

April 11: A week later, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that a 9-year-old girl in foster care was being held in an Acadia facility in Montana. The girl’s biological mother along with the help of court-appointed public defender Annett Smith had been trying to get the facility to quit giving the daughter injections of drugs as a method of calming her down. Smith and the girl’s mother voiced concerns that the facility was giving the child the idea that injections were a reasonable response when she struggles to control herself. “She needs to learn coping skills and ways to calm her body that don’t use emergency injectables,” Smith said, adding both she and the girl’s mother became concerned for the child’s safety.[16]

April 17: Less than a week later, in the UK, Acadia’s The Priory psychiatric hospital chain was fined £300,000 (U.S. $389,000) over the November 2012 death of a 14-year old girl, Amy El-Keria.[17] A 2016 Inquest into the teen’s death found neglect on the part of Ticehurst House psychiatric facility and found Amy had died accidentally of unintended consequences of a deliberate act. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) pursued a criminal investigation and the company admitted to a charge of being an employer failing to discharge its duty to ensure people were not exposed to health and safety risks. Mr. Justice Dingemans, sentencing the company at Lewes crown court on 17 April 2019, said the penalty could “never reflect the loss suffered by Amy’s family in this case.” At an earlier hearing, the court heard that Amy, who has a “known and recent history” of suicide attempts, arrived at the hospital’s high-dependency unit on 23 August 2012. On 12 November, at 8.15pm, she was found in her bedroom with a ligature tied around her neck and taken to Conquest hospital in Hastings. She died the following day after life support was withdrawn.[18]

A month earlier, on March 18, the Reveal News story headlined, “US government uses several clandestine shelters to detain immigrant children,” exposed that Acadia-owned Millcreek psychiatric facility in Arkansas and Rolling Hills psychiatric hospital in Oklahoma, had been giving residential treatment to immigrant minors, with Millcreek ”holding at least eight children in the refugee agency’s custody.” Rolling Hills had at least one child. An investigation by The Oklahoman published earlier this year revealed that patients complained of broken bones, along with “allegations of sexual harassment and physical abuse” at the hospital.

In November, 2018 a critical investor detailed a litany of abuse allegations at Acadia-run facilities, including Rolling Hills. A December 2017 lawsuit also accused Acadia and Rolling Hills of permitting ongoing sexual abuse inside a facility for children, destroying video evidence and refusing access to a state investigator.[19]

Then there’s Sundance Behavioral Healthcare System that closed three facilities in North Texas in December 2018 after a Tarrant County grand jury indicted the company and a psychiatrist for allegedly holding patients against their will.[20] Investigators alleged Sundance illegally detained patients for longer than 48 hours and, in some cases, also allegedly refused to allow voluntary patients to leave the facility. Criminal District Attorney Sharen Wilson said in a statement, “These offenses were a corporate failure, and the corporation must be held accountable.”[21]

However, if fines and criminal accountability were made a greater deterrent in the behavioral health/psychiatric industry, lives could be protected. As media reported in February this year, inspectors from the Texas Health and Human Services Commission visited the Sundance hospital numerous times, finding problems with the care in 2016. Yet the hospital only received fines of $28,500 in August 2016 and $650 in 2017 for not holding required fire drills, according to NBC.[22]

Potentially facing millions of dollars in penalties, on February 1, 2019, Sundance Behavioral Health System filed for bankruptcy. [23]

The indictment is appropriate criminal response that should followed across the country and in the UK, where large U.S. behavioral hospital chains have a monopoly on mental health in the private sector.

Astoundingly, UHS recently unveiled plans to build a behavioral health hospital—an extension of Laurel Ridge Treatment Center in Texas—targeting first responders and military veterans for treatment. Laurel Ridge’s program services more than 100 military installations in San Antonio, as well as across the United States and in other countries.[24]

In 2016, a family filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against Laurel Ridge Treatment Center alleging the center failed to protect their daughter, who was sexually assaulted by a counselor, Alexander Williams. Williams was arrested on multiple charges of sexual assault of a child and sentenced to eight years in prison.[25]

CCHR says that in lieu of governments taking effective legislative action to protect patients against unsafe and harmful practices in for-profit and state psychiatric facilities, an army of attorneys and prosecutors could curb the massive abuse in the mental health industry by litigating and establishing precedents of protection.

By CCHR International
The Mental Health Industry Watchdog
April 19, 2019

Human rights advocates, legislators, doctors, attorneys and community and civic leaders from across the globe gathered at the Langham Hotel in Pasadena on April 13 for the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) 50th Anniversary and Human Rights Awards celebration. Dozens of proclamations, commendations and letters of congratulations acknowledging this milestone from government and community groups attest to the organization’s many accomplishments in the field of human rights.

Australian psychiatrist, Niall McLaren, wrote that CCHR’s work is “essential if we are to counter the endless propaganda of dehumanizing psychiatry” and “the idea that unhappy or distressed young people must be stripped of their human rights and drugged into conformity.”

Oleg Kilkevich, a U.S. college nursing educator, said CCHR “has a long history of fighting bravely and relentlessly for human rights. It has been responsible for many great reforms that now protect patients against, ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,’ as outlined under Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

Professor Lothar Krappmann, a former member of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, wrote: “If you point out that I have achieved something for the misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated children, then I must add that this was possible, because of the good information and documents I have received from CCHR.”

Each year, CCHR presents Human Rights Awards to individuals who display exemplary courage in the fight for restoration of basic human rights in the field of mental health.

This year’s recipients of the CCHR Human Rights Award included:

Attorney Andy Vickery, recipient of the 2019 CCHR Human Rights Award

For more than 30 years, Texas attorney Andy Vickery has taken on pharmaceutical companies over the violence- and suicide-inducing effects of psychotropic drugs. His $6.4 million judgment for the family of a man who killed three relatives and himself after taking the antidepressant Paxil, broke through the industry’s legal defense armor. Vickery believes in speaking out in pursuit of what is right despite the odds and opposition. His passion for bringing justice to those harmed by psychiatric drugs prompted the Indianapolis Star to nickname him “Eli Lilly and Co.’s legal nightmare.”

In accepting the award, Vickery said, “This year CCHR is celebrating its 50th year of speaking Truth to Power, by which I mean speaking an unpopular but essential truth to people in power who may not want to hear it.” Further, “I commend you for that dedication and tenacity and applaud CCHR’s endeavors and your continued support of them.”

Writer, producer and director Kevin Miller has trained a spotlight on profound and harrowing psychotropic drug damage through his inimitable documentaries Generation Rx and Letters from Generation Rx. Millions prescribed antidepressants and other psychotropic drugs have discovered the hidden perils of these drugs. These films tell the stories of thousands of people who experienced their harm firsthand. “We must immerse ourselves into the lives of others who have been victimized, or have experienced the kind of unfathomable loss” witnessed in these films, Miller stated. “Courage is something we are all honoring tonight, as we acknowledge CCHR and all they stand for and support on this, their 50th anniversary of defending human rights.”

Detroit Civil Rights Attorney, Allison Folmar

Detroit Civil Rights attorney, Allison Folmar also gave a special address at the gala, saying, “As a civil rights lawyer that has worked with CCHR for many years, I am honored to be here in salute to CCHR’s 50 years of fighting for justice and freedoms in the mental health system.” Folmar spoke of being honored to become the latest member of CCHR International’s advisory board: “Joining this prestigious group of advisors has inspired me even more to build an even bigger army of attorneys to fight alongside CCHR” because “too many parents, too many families, have been harmed, misled, threatened, coerced and forced by the psychiatric industry.”

In 1969, CCHR was cofounded by the Church of Scientology and professor of psychiatry Dr. Thomas Szasz. Its first abuse case involved the plight of Hungarian refugee Victor Gyory who was involuntarily detained in Haverford State Hospital in Pennsylvania after psychiatrists diagnosed his “babbling in tongues” as “schizophrenia.” He was drugged and electroshocked against his will. CCHR filed a writ of habeas corpus, Dr. Szasz testified that Gyory’s “babbling” was his speaking Hungarian, and CCHR secured Gyory’s release from the hospital.

As CCHR co-founder, the late Thomas Szasz stated, “The task we set ourselves, to combat psychiatric coercion, is important. It is a noble task in the pursuit of which we must, regardless of obstacles, persevere. Our conscience demands we do no less.”

In the early 1970s, in apartheid South Africa, CCHR discovered psychiatrists incarcerated 10,000 blacks and used them as slave labor. CCHR documented the crimes, including electroshocking patients without anesthetic and allowing them to die from easily treatable illnesses. The group reported them to the World Health Organization, which investigated the camps and issue a report in 1983 stating that “in no other medical field…is the contempt of the person cultivated by racism, more precisely portrayed than in psychiatry.”

After the fall of apartheid, CCHR obtained a national government inquiry into psychiatric racism in institutions. They also presented testimony to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission providing a detailed history of mental health studies that had helped to entrench and perpetuate apartheid, as well as psychiatry’s role in apartheid abuse. In 2001, a South African government minister applauded CCHR for its courage, compassion and exemplary fight against apartheid psychiatry, which had “blatantly discriminated against Black people.”

In 1976, CCHR helped secure passage of a California law prohibiting the use of electroshock (ECT) and psychosurgery on children and adolescents. Now used as a model the world over, the law has inspired other countries to enact restrictions and, in Western Australia, criminal penalties if ECT is administered to minors.

For a decade, CCHR investigated and exposed Deep Sleep Treatment (DST) at Chelmsford Private Psychiatric Hospital in Sydney, Australia. Patients were rendered unconscious with drugs and electroshocked daily—48 died. The result was the 1983 Mental Health Act making it a criminal offense for psychiatrists to use DST and, in 1990, a Royal Commission was held into DST and mental health treatment. Patrick Griffin, an Australian Lawyer, who represented CCHR in the Royal Commission said: “The campaign by CCHR in relation to Chelmsford Hospital and to obtain a Royal Commission was the most sustained and thorough exercise in whistleblowing, investigatory reporting and public interest work in the history of this country – bar none!”

After CCHR exposed inhumane conditions in Italian asylums, 97 were shut down and the patients rescued and taught to care for themselves for the first time in their lives.

In Germany, CCHR investigated the role of German psychiatrists and The Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry role in the Holocaust, including helping legitimize sterilization and the murder of the so-called “unfit.” In 2017, Sociologist, Dr. Peter Shulte, wrote that in response, “The Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry pulled out all stops to refute or eliminate the allegations regarding its past.”

However, CCHR’s research culminated in the 1995 publication of Psychiatrists: The Men Behind Hitler. In 2010, Dr. Frank Schneider, president of the German Association for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics (DGPPN), wrote an apology and confessed that German psychiatrists “lied to and deceived patients in their care and their families. They forced them to be sterilized, arranged their deaths and even performed killings themselves. They also murdered physically and mentally disabled children in more than 30 psychiatric and pediatric hospitals.” The DGPPN went further to say, psychiatrists had also “laid the scientific foundations of the euthanasia program.

In 1991, CCHR helped push through FDA hearings into antidepressants and their involvement in suicidal and homicidal reactions in users. It took 13 years of persistent work alongside parents, medical experts and attorneys to force the FDA to issue a stringent black box warning that antidepressants can cause suicidal thoughts and actions in those 18 years of age and younger—a warning later extended to age 24.

In 2004, CCHR was also among those that obtained a U.S. Prohibition of Child Medication Safety law that banned schools from forcing schoolchildren to take prescription psychotropic drugs as a requisite for their schooling.

In 2007, CCHR helped secure language in the FDA reform bill making it mandatory for all printed pharmaceutical ads to advise patients to report drug adverse reactions directly to the FDA. Following the first ads, adverse drug reports increased 33 percent.

For nearly 30 years, CCHR has investigated psychiatric fraud that has included psychiatrists billing their sexual abuse of patients as “therapy,” billing for treatment never rendered and even for patients that were dead. In the for-profit psychiatric hospital industry, this has resulted in their paying more than $2 billion in civil and criminal fines since the early 1990s. CCHR helped secure 28 laws around the world that now make mental health practitioner sexual abuse of patients a criminal offense punishable by jail. And an average of 170 psychiatrists and psychologists are now disciplined for or convicted of crimes every year that include sexual abuse and fraud.

CCHR presented submissions to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), warning about the massive prescribing of psychotropic drugs to children in 14 countries. UNCRC responded with hearings on the increasing rate of children labeled with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and drugged with psychostimulants. It recommended establishment of a system for “monitoring of the excessive use of psychostimulants to children.”

In 2010 and 2012, CCHR New Zealand presented reports to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, detailing violations of human rights at Lake Alice Hospital in New Zealand where ECT and other coercive psychiatric techniques were used to punish children. The UN responded by directing the New Zealand government to implement systems to prevent psychiatric abuses in the future.

CCHR’s decades of exposing psychiatric treatment as torture was vindicated by a 2013 UN Rapporteur on Torture report that condemned coercive shock treatment and called upon states to “impose an absolute ban on all forced and nonconsensual medical interventions against persons with disabilities, including the nonconsensual administration of psychosurgery, electroshock and mind-altering drugs.”

Nearly 200 laws and countless regulations protecting human rights in the field of mental health today stand in testament to the passion and perseverance of the members, partners and supporters of Citizens Commission on Human Rights.

]]>The Challenge of Going Off Psychiatric Drugshttps://www.cchrint.org/2019/04/03/the-challenge-of-going-off-psychiatric-drugs/
Wed, 03 Apr 2019 17:14:12 +0000https://www.cchrint.org/?p=45185Millions of Americans have taken antidepressants for many years. What happens when it’s time to stop?

The New Yorker
By Rachel Aviv
April 1, 2019

Laura Delano recognized that she was “excellent at everything, but it didn’t mean anything,” her doctor wrote. She grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the wealthiest communities in the country. Her father is related to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and her mother was introduced to society at a débutante ball at the Waldorf-Astoria. In eighth grade, in 1996, Laura was the class president—she ran on a platform of planting daffodils on the school’s grounds—and among the best squash players in the country. She was one of those rare proportional adolescents with a thriving social life. But she doubted whether she had a “real self underneath.”

The oldest of three sisters, Laura felt as if she were living two separate lives, one onstage and the other in the audience, reacting to an exhausting performance. She snapped at her mother, locked herself in her room, and talked about wanting to die. She had friends at school who cut themselves with razors, and she was intrigued by what seemed to be an act of defiance. She tried it, too. “The pain felt so real and raw and mine,” she said.

Her parents took her to a family therapist, who, after several months, referred her to a psychiatrist. Laura was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and prescribed Depakote, a mood stabilizer that, the previous year, had been approved for treating bipolar patients. She hid the pills in a jewelry box in her closet and then washed them down the sink.

She hoped that she might discover a more authentic version of herself at Harvard, where she arrived as a freshman in 2001. Her roommate, Bree Tse, said, “Laura just blew me away—she was this golden girl, so vibrant and attentive and in tune with people.” On her first day at Harvard, Laura wandered the campus and thought, This is everything I’ve been working for. I’m finally here.

She tried out new identities. Sometimes she fashioned herself as a “fun, down-to-earth girl” who drank until early morning with boys who considered her chill. Other times, she was a postmodern nihilist, deconstructing the arbitrariness of language. “I remember talking with her a lot about surfaces,” a classmate, Patrick Bensen, said. “That was a recurring theme: whether the surface of people can ever harmonize with what’s inside their minds.”

Watch “The Backstory”: Rachel Aviv on the challenges one woman faced while going off psychiatric drugs.

During her winter break, she spent a week in Manhattan preparing for two débutante balls, at the Waldorf-Astoria and at the Plaza Hotel. She went to a bridal store and chose a floor-length strapless white gown and white satin gloves that reached above her elbows. Her sister Nina said that, at the Waldorf ball, “I remember thinking Laura was so much a part of it.”

Yet, in pictures before the second ball, Laura is slightly hunched over, as if trying to minimize the breadth of her muscular shoulders. She wears a thin pearl necklace, and her blond hair is coiled in an ornate bun. Her smile is pinched and dutiful. That night, before walking onstage, Laura did cocaine and chugged champagne. By the end of the party, she was sobbing so hard that the escort she’d invited to the ball had to put her in a cab. In the morning, she told her family that she didn’t want to be alive. She took literally the symbolism of the parties, meant to mark her entry into adulthood. “I didn’t know who I was,” she said. “I was trapped in the life of a stranger.”

Before Laura returned to Harvard, her doctor in Greenwich referred her to a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Massachusetts. One of the oldest hospitals in New England, McLean has treated a succession of celebrity patients, including Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Sylvia Plath, who described it as “the best mental hospital in the US.” Laura’s psychiatrist had Ivy League degrees, and she felt grateful to have his attention. In his notes, he described her as an “engaging, outgoing, and intelligent young woman,” who “grew up with high expectations for social conformity.” She told him, “I lie in my bed for hours at a time staring at the wall and wishing so much that I could be ‘normal.’ ”

The psychiatrist confirmed her early diagnosis, proposing that she had bipolar II, a less severe form of the disorder. Laura was relieved to hear the doctor say that her distress stemmed from an illness. “It was like being told, It’s not your fault. You are not lazy. You are not irresponsible.” After she left the appointment, she felt joyful. “The psychiatrist told me who I was in a way that felt more concrete than I’d ever conceptualized before,” she said. “It was as though he could read my mind, as though I didn’t need to explain anything to him, because he already knew what I was going to say. I had bipolar disorder. I’d had it all along.” She called her father, crying. “I have good news,” she said. “He’s figured out the problem.”

She began taking twenty milligrams of Prozac, an antidepressant; when she still didn’t feel better, her dose was increased to forty milligrams, and then to sixty. With each raised dose, she felt thankful to have been heard. “It was a way for me to mark to the world: this is how much pain I am in,” she said. Laura wasn’t sure whether Prozac actually lifted her mood—roughly a third of patients who take antidepressants do not respond to them—but her emotions felt less urgent and distracting, and her classwork improved. “I remember her carrying around this plastic pillbox with compartments for all the days of the week,” a friend from high school said. “It was part of this mysterious world of her psychiatric state.”

At parties, she flirted intently, but by the time she and a partner were together in bed, she said, “I’d kind of get hit with this realization that I was physically disconnected. And then I’d feel taken advantage of, and I would kind of flip out and start crying, and the guy would be, like, ‘What the heck is going on?’ ” Most antidepressants dampen sexuality—up to seventy per cent of people who take the medications report this response—but Laura was ashamed to talk about the problem with her psychiatrist. “I assumed he’d see sexuality as a luxury,” she said. “He’d be, like, ‘Really? You have this serious illness, and you’re worried about that?’ ”

During her junior year, her pharmacologist raised her Prozac prescription to eighty milligrams, the maximum recommended dose. The Prozac made her drowsy, so he prescribed two hundred milligrams of Provigil, a drug for narcolepsy that is often taken by soldiers and truck drivers to stay awake during overnight shifts. The Provigil gave her so much energy that, she said, “I was just a machine.” She was on the varsity squash team and played the best squash of her life. She was so alert that she felt as if she could “figure people out,” unpacking the details of their identities: she imagined that she could peer into their childhoods and see how their parents had raised them.

The Provigil made it hard for Laura to sleep, so her pharmacologist prescribed Ambien, which she took every night. In the course of a year, her doctors had created what’s known as “a prescription cascade”: the side effects of one medication are diagnosed as symptoms of another condition, leading to a succession of new prescriptions. Her energy levels rose and fell so quickly that she was told she had a version of bipolar disorder called “rapid cycling,” a term that describes people who have four or more manic episodes in a year, but is also applied, more loosely, to people who shift dramatically between moods. Sometimes Laura thought, Women who are happy and socialize like to buy dresses. She’d go to Nordstrom and buy two or three dresses. She recognized that this behavior was “textbook”—she had bought her own copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—but the awareness didn’t prevent the purchases.

Laura felt that the pressures of her junior year were paralyzing, so she did not return for the spring semester. That summer, she kept a journal in which she outlined her personal goals: “overanalysis must go”; “stop molding myself to the ideal person for my surroundings”; “find some faith in something, in anything.” But the idea of returning to Harvard that fall made her so distressed that she thought every day about dying. She took the semester off, and, at her request, her parents drove her to a hospital in Westchester County, New York. A psychiatrist there wrote that she “presents with inability to function academically.” At the hospital, where she stayed for two weeks, she was put on a new combination of pills: Lamictal, a mood stabilizer; Lexapro, an antidepressant; and Seroquel, an antipsychotic that she was told to use as a sleep aid. Her father, Lyman, said, “I had no conviction that the drugs were helping. Or that they weren’t helping.”

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Johnson & Johnson’s (J&Js) new nasal spray antidepressant, esketamine (Spravato[1]) after an FDA advisory committee voted on February 12, 2019 in its favor.[2] The drug is a chemical mirror of ketamine, a potent “dissociative anesthetic” that is abused as the illegal “club drug,” Special K, and generates an intense high and euphoric effects, and hallucinations. This adds to the mind-numbing of America that an FDA-psychiatric collusion is causing, says the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR). The group said the FDA’s continuing clearance of potentially addictive and dangerous psychotropic drugs and, more recently, electroshock treatment devices, fuels a lucrative $35 billion a year industry at the cost of consumers’ mental health and lives.

Astoundingly, with more than 43.6 million Americans each year now taking antidepressants once touted as “miracle pills,” psychiatrists now claim that the drugs don’t work in one out of every three people taking them. It was known when the drugs were approved that they could cause suicidal thoughts and violence-related effects—hardly a recipe for improving depression. CCHR, a 50-year mental health watchdog, established by the Church of Scientology, says psychiatrists often also recommend electroshock treatment—up to 460 volts of electricity sent through the brain to cause a grand-mal seizure—when antidepressants and other psychopharmaceuticals fail.

Jan Eastgate, president of CCHR International, says: “Drugs and ECT are recommended for ‘treatment-resistant depression,’ a term invented to mislead consumers into thinking the problem is theirs and not the failure of psychiatric treatments. Despite the failure, the serious and deadly risks of treatment and a history of manufacturers covering up adverse effects, the FDA keeps giving them license to profit.”

Between 1988 and 2005, the FDA approved nine new antidepressants and five new antipsychotics.[3] At least four more antidepressants have been approved since 2010.[4] Drug companies provide 60% of the FDA’s drug review costs—a colossal conflict of interest—representing more than $712 million a year in revenue.[5] There’s another estimated $24 million for medical device clearance.[6]

This adds to a lucrative mental health market. Spending on non-institutionalized mental disorder treatment accounted for $89 billion in 2013.[7] The up to 90% prevalence of polypharmacy in psychiatry—prescribing a patient multiple drugs—would contribute to those costs.[8]

Esketamine is but another touted “hopeful” drug that will merely mask—but not cure—depression. The nasal spray will be given with an antidepressant.[9]

Several side effects of esketamine are dissociation and sedation, prompting the FDA advisory panel to recommend not allowing people to take the nasal spray at home but remain monitored in a healthcare facility for two hours until these side effects subside.[10]

There’s been a boom in the off-label (non-FDA approved) use of ketamine as a treatment for depression and other psychiatric conditions. Dozens of for-profit ketamine clinics have opened up around the country,[xi] including in Florida.[12] The clinics regularly charge $650 – $1,200 per treatment, with most people needing six – eight treatments (up to $9,600) to get started.[13]

J&J anticipates $1 billion-plus in sales from a crop of new drugs that includes esketamine. This won’t recoup the costs it has paid in settlements of lawsuits over its antipsychotic, Risperdal (risperidone) and a $2.2 billion Department of Justice fine over marketing and selling Risperdal and other drugs off-label.[14] J&J has paid out millions of dollars to settle lawsuits about its failure to warn that Risperdal can cause gynecomastia (male breast growth). One youth was awarded $70 million in damages after alleging Risperdal caused him to grow size 42D breasts.[15] None of this appears to be of concern to FDA officials or psychiatrists advocating for yet another brain-altering drug.

The FDA has also approved antipsychotics as adjuncts to antidepressants when they’ve failed. Studies show aripiprazole (Abilify), olanzapine/fluoxetine (Symbyax), quetiapine (Seroquel) and risperidone (Risperdal) have been used with antidepressants. Yet a study by Glen Spielmans, Ph.D., a researcher and associate professor of psychology at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, found that in “terms of quality of life and how well people were functioning, there was really not much evidence that these drugs did anything.” There was “abundant evidence of potential treatment-related harm,” including weight gain, akathisia (uncontrollable restlessness), and abnormal results from cholesterol and other metabolic-related laboratory tests.[16]

Now add to these chemical bombs, electroshock. This has an up to 70% failure (relapse) rate within six months of receiving it.[17] Antidepressants are continued with ECT.

Diane Stein, president of CCHR Florida, who is investigating psychotropic drug use and electroshock in Florida, said the level of misrepresentation about these treatments’ risks starts with psychiatry and runs through the FDA and at state level. “The University of Florida Health recommends maintenance ECT up to every two to three months, while asserting that it works by making the brain ‘rewire’ itself—without any scientific evidence to support this. Concurrent psychiatric drugs are usual practice, which is simply evidence that ECT doesn’t work.”

Eastgate and Stein say the FDA’s approval process needs investigating, including its collusion with psychiatric organizations pushing drugs and electroshock—a combination that puts industry interests above patient protection. They urge people to support a ban on ECT in Florida and nationally.